52 TOILERS IN THE SEA. 



can be no doubt, whatever, that we have, forming at 

 the bottom of the present ocean, a vast sheet of rock 

 which very closely resembles chalk, and there can be 

 as little doubt that the old chalk, the cretaceous 

 formation which, in some parts of England, has been 

 subjected to enormous denudation, and which is 

 overlaid by the beds of the tertiary series, was pro- 

 duced in the same manner, and under closely similar 

 circumstances ; and not the chalk only, but, most 

 probably, all the great limestone formations. In 

 almost all of these the remains of Foraminifera are 

 abundant, some of them, apparently, specifically iden- 

 tical with living forms." 1 It was under these impres- 

 sions, and with these views, that he publicly used the 

 expression to which geologists took exception, that 

 "we might be regarded, in a certain sense, as still 

 living in the cretaceous period." But it seems that 

 the mode of expression was censured rather than 

 the opinion, since he afterwards declared that " the 

 doctrine of the continuity of the chalk, in the sense 

 in which we understood it, is now very generally 

 accepted." In confirmation of this view may be cited 

 the remarks of Professor Huxley, in his anniversary 

 address as President of the Geological Society, in 

 1870, when he said, " Many years ago I ventured to 

 speak of the Atlantic mud as ' modern chalk/ and I 



1 "_ Depths of the Ocean," p. 470. 



